Remote Viewing (3.5e Variant Rule)

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Check: You can make a Remote Viewing check to sense a particular place, creature, or thing known to you. The base DC is 10, modified by familiarity. If successful, you can observe the subject as if you were physically present and the subject is considered in your line of sight for purposes of other psychic skills. The vision lasts for as long as you maintain it, but your ordinary senses are overridden, so you are unaware of what is happening near you while you are observing events elsewhere. Remote Viewing creates a psychic disturbance that creatures with Int 10 or better can detect. Any such creature under observation can make an Intelligence or Psychic Sense check, opposed by your Remote Viewing check. Nonpsychic creatures get the intense feeling of being watched. Creatures with the Psychic Ability feat see a ghostly or shadowy image of you. You are also considered in the creature’s line of sight for the purposes of psychic skills.

Special: You can take 10 when making a Remote Viewing check, but you can’t take 20.

Time: Remote Viewing is a full-round action. You must concentrate to maintain it.

In the past, some psychics and scholars have considered remote viewing a separate phenomenon from “astral projection,”
sending the spirit or life force out of the body to visit distant locales. This is likely because of the ghostly or shadowy images of remote viewers that some subjects notice. Some remote viewers perceive themselves as having an “astral body” while others feel like they are entirely disembodied.

Gamemasters wanting to include astral projection in the campaign can emphasize the ghostly image created by remote viewers, even allowing remote viewers to deliberately make themselves visible to those they “visit.” This may explain stories about ghostly visions and manifestations. The Mental Contact skill even allows remote viewers to “speak” to others in places they are viewing. Since a remote viewer’s image is considered in the line of sight of other psychics, mental combat can take place between another psychic and a remote viewer or even between two remote viewers focused in the same area. The issue of whether remote viewers go “out of body” is largely semantic since a remote viewer’s body is essentially immobile and helpless while using the skill.